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The Midnight Station
The Midnight Station is a surrealist freeware Action RPG released on October 9, 2014 by indie game studio Studio Anjin. The game was originally intended to be a much smaller release for the indie game development competition SpeccyJam (more specifically SpeccyJam 2), but the people at Studio Anjin really liked the idea and felt like the game was worthy of continued development, so the game ended up taking two months to complete. The game has been described as a conglomeration of exploration and puzzle-solving elements of La-Mulana, level/stat progression and equipment of other Action RPGs such as Diablo, and combat elements of twin-stick shooters. As mentioned above, the game is free, but there is also the option to donate to Studio Anjin, making the game somewhat more in the vein of a Pay-What-You-Want game. Gameplay The Midnight Station, as mentioned above, incorporates twin-stick shooting, puzzle, exploration, and RPG-style progression into the gameplay. The titular Midnight Station is a sort of hub area for all of the game world to connect to in some way. Much like Dark Souls, the entire world is open from the very beginning, although as is the case with Dark Souls, there is a generally recommended first area to go to. Midnight Station also has RPG elements in which killing enemies gives you experience (identified in-Game as Experiences) which can be used to either level up your character or to buy equipment from a merchant that can be found early in the game. These stats are: Purpose (an upper bound for the damage range); Clarity (a lower bound for the damage range); Imagery (rate of fire); Resolve (maximum health); Recover (rate of health regeneration); Fervour (maximum equipment capacity (called Guilt in-game); higher Guilt linearly decreases movement speed); Passing (movement speed); Subsist (rate of energy regeneration), and Hyaline (length of invincibility grace period every time damaged). Throughout the world there are puzzles; sometimes the area itself is a puzzle, and sometimes the puzzle is figuring out how to fight a boss. There are fourteen bosses within the game, along with an alleged fifteenth hidden boss (although that has not been confirmed at this point). Story The Midnight Station starts off with the death of humanity through a nuclear cataclysm. An enigmatic figure known as The Architect witnesses the end of humanity and intervenes; transforming the entire human species into one living entity, "Humanity," for the purposes of preservation in his collection. As mentioned in the Gameplay segment, the Midnight Station is merely one area of the collective game world known as The Architecture. The Architecture is growing more and more unstable as time goes along, evidenced by the Unimportant Man's line about the area Our Abstract merging with the Tax Returns. Because of this, the goal in Midnight Station is to escape from The Architecture. When the game is started, Humanity starts out in the Midnight Station in front of a bathroom, which will be a conglomeration point for NPCs throughout the course of the game (much like Firelink Shrine in Dark Souls). From here, the story is fairly non-linear much like the gameplay, eventually tying off in the last area of the game. Reception The Midnight Station has been well-received so far, with praise from such people as popular Youtube Let's Player Cloud8745. More notes on reception will be added as time continues and the game is discovered more and more.